Tuesday, November 9, 2021

White Dwarf: Issue #16

Issue #16 of White Dwarf (December/January 1979/1980) features a remarkable cover by Les Edwards. Edwards did a lot of cover illustrations for Games Workshop over the years, as well as providing them for the Fighting Fantasy series. That's probably why this issue gives off such powerful vibes for me, even though I never owned it at the time of its original release. It also helps that the issue's contents are excellent, as I'll discuss presently.

"Chronicle Monsters" by Lewis Pulsipher is a collection of monsters for D&D derived from Stephen Donaldson's "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" series. The accompanying illustrations are by Russ Nicholson, which is always a treat. Part IV of Andy Slack's "Expanding Universe" for Traveller focuses on social standing and psionics. "Boot Hill Encounters" by Dominic Beddow is, as its title suggests, a collection of random encounters for use with TSR's Boot Hill or other Wild West RPGs. I was surprised to see this article, short though it is, simply because, even in the United States, Western-themed RPGs have always been an acquired taste at best. I can't imagine the genre is any more popular in Britain, but perhaps this simply shows my ignorance.

"Open Box" reviews four products, starting with Boot Hill, which scores 8 out of 10. Also reviewed are GDW's Imperium (9 out of 10) and Snapshot (8 out of 10). The final review – by Don Turnbull – is the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Turnbull's review is, of course, effusive, so much so in fact that he offers no numerical score for the book. Instead, he says the following:

In the end, set the task of reviewing something to which I know I cannot do justice, all I can say is – can you afford to be without it?

I say again: it's little wonder to me that Turnbull would eventually be selected to head up TSR UK.

"Paths of the Lil" is a Gamma World adventure by James Ward. This is a scenario that's appeared in various forms over the years, including the second edition of the game published in 1983. Meanwhile, "The Fiend Factory" offers up five more monsters for use with Dungeons & Dragons. "Treasure Chest" presents seventeen new potions, a few of which are quite fun. Consider, for example, the potion of truth:


Mind you, I'm a fan of cursed items and think they ought to be used more often in games, so your mileage may vary. 

Finishing out the issue is a brief report on Games Day V, which took place in October 1979. Accompanying the article are a number of photographs, some of which are quite charming, like this one:

All in all, I found issue #16 very enjoyable. As I mentioned at the start of this post, it looked and felt very much like the issues I would buy and devour several years hence. I'll be very curious to see if this one represents a turning point in the magazine's history and that the things I recognize here, like the cover and interior artwork, will become permanent features or if there will still be a few more bumps in the road.

16 comments:

  1. A Boot Hill article *and* a Gamma World adventure (which I immediately recognized from the 2e GW boxed set...), I would have loved this issue for those alone!
    Sadly as I think I have mentioned, I never saw the pre-WH/40k issues of White Dwarf.

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  2. The Western genre is probably more popular for individual character gaming in the UK - arguably the first British game that had roleplaying elements was Skirmish Wargames' The Old West, and there was Once Upon A Time In The West, which was pretty much a British equivalent of Boot Hill.

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  3. There were only three TV channels as I was growing up in the UK in the 70s...and not much of interest for us kids. But there were plenty of war movies and westerns on TV on Saturdays and Sundays as well as regular repeats of shows like the High Chapparal and Kung Fu...so us Brits were pretty familiar with the genre.

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  4. Considering the high quality of product that came out of TSR UK, I don’t get the constant innuendo re: Don Turnbull.

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    1. Only that he seems to gush about anything TSR published in his reviews. You're right that TSR UK produced some truly high quality material, though.

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    2. While his reviews are pretty consistently paeans to TSR products, in this case it's hard to argue with him. If you're running AD&D as your preferred flavor of RPG the DMG is something you really can't be without.

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  5. Re: Western themed games.
    In the early 80s, when we were introduced to rpgs and wargaming, I remember that my older brother and his friends were into a skirmish wargame called "Pony Express" or something like that, it seemed pretty popular at the time.

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  6. Found it!
    "Pony wars"
    https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9393/pony-wars-or-b-troop-aint-coming-back

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    1. Hey, I dimly remember playing that with cheap plastic toys at the local gaming club. The people who ran the game were still doing Western minis games as late as 2015, using Playskool playsets at that point. :)

      Only stretch where I recall Western RPGs doing well was around when Deadlands came out, and of course that was Weird West with all sorts of supernatural stuff and an alternate timeline. Lasted maybe five or six years locally before the fad died off.

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  7. This sounds like an issue I would have loved, that kind of varied content is what I always looked for in full-size gaming mags - the small format ones like zines and Autoduel Quarterly and Interplay could be more one-trick ponies, though.

    "Mind you, I'm a fan of cursed items and think they ought to be used more often in games, so your mileage may vary."

    While I agree in principle, I prefer my cursed stuff to offer enough of a benefit that the players opts to keep the fool thing despite its drawbacks rather than it simply being a full-on negative. That potion, for ex - I would have liked it better if it forced everyone within earshot to answer questions truthfully rather than just the imbiber, and maybe toss in a Comprehend Languages effect while we're at it so folks could dodge around it by speaking an incomprehensible language.

    For a more martial example of "good item, bad curse" see here:

    https://sanctumreconditesage.blogspot.com/2020/11/cursed-whetstone-armor.html

    Then again, I kind of prefer my not-cursed magic items to have weird drawbacks and complications too, as anyone who's read my roleplaying posts on that blog probably knows.


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  8. Out of morbid curiosity, does anyone have an opinion on the (hopefully) final four books in the Thomas Covenant series? I struggled hard to even make it through the second trilogy and came to utterly despise Donaldson's writing style over time, so I'm unlikely to ever finish the full run - but I do wonder if I'm missing anything I should care about.

    Very much one of those authors I read when I was younger and less critical and outgrew with time - putting him in the same league as Piers Anthony or Terry Brooks or David Eddings - although I confess I was still able to bear the latter's writings out of nostalgia until hearing about his child abuse conviction.

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    1. I didn't even finish the second book, too awful.

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    2. Having choked down the unashamed and utterly pointless rape in the opening chapters of the first book I managed to grind through on the assumption that that leperous bastard would get a proper comeuppance eventually, and it couldn't get much worse. Stupid me.

      That was back when I was young and thought leaving a book or series unfinished was practically a mortal sin. Can thank Piers Anthony for breaking me of that nonsense.

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  9. OK, my last attempt seems to have vanished into the ether, so here it is again:
    Ye gods, there are 10 Thomas Covenant books? Doesn't he die in the 6th?

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    1. If the wiki synopsis is correct, the rotten bastard gets resurrected somewhere around the end of book eight.

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  10. This was the first issue I bought... Its impossible to explain nowadays how important this magazine was to us British gamers back in the day.

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